Cisco Live's 7 Best Scenes

Attendees at Cisco Live this week were showered in APIs and ACI, and swimming in selfies. Take a look at the highlights from the annual customer event.

1 of 8

At Cisco Live this week at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, the company put its best foot forward, treating customers, partners, and media to a wide range of education and activities -- of course, through the lens of the tech vendor. The conference celebrated its 25th year, hosting a record-breaking 25,000 live attendees and 200,000 virtual participants.

Spirits ran high and WiFi consumption skyrocketed as old friends reconnected and new technologies were debated. There was serious work done and serious socializing. Here we've selected the seven outstanding takeaways. Are we missing your favorites?

Susan Fogarty has almost two decades of experience writing and developing content for IT professionals, especially those deeply involved in enterprise network infrastructure. She previously worked at TechTarget, where she spent 11 years, six as the Editorial Director of its ... View Full Bio

My favorite thing at the CL keynotes of late is looking at the front blocks of seats where you have the attendees of the Business track in the front middle, then CCIE/DE NetVets seated either side.

The middle block is all button down shirts and suits; the outer blocks are Hawaiian shirts, shorts, sneakers and jeans. I posted a couple of pictures here - search for John Chambers and you'll find them. The difference is very obvious!

I couldn't be there the last couple of years and I'm sad to miss this one. Will it be John Chambers' last as CEO? We'll see I guess.

Hi Marcia, it's great to see a high level of interest by IT professionals in conferences that concern networks. This high level of interest creates an environment where multiple individuals are keeping up with the pace of innovations that are taking place in the industry and in-turn disseminating the information gained -- collectivity this allows everyone to not have to rediscover fire.

Hi Brian -- It was a pretty orderly run into the keynote by the first ones in line, so it was all fairly safe. A friend told me he's seen crowds rush into other high-profile tech keynotes, so I guess this wasn't an anomoly -- just nothing I'd seen before!

Susan, "running to get into the keynote" I am imagining a lion king style stampede of 20,000+ IT professionals, but I don't blame them because information about the network (and the future network to come) is an important area. Safety is important, I guess online attendees were safer, and maybe, someday 200,000+ IT attendees will collaborate with the show using Full-Body Collaboration -- it would be great.

Marcia, I agree, I have never seen so many "ushers" -- I wonder if they were counted in the total attendees because there were probably thousands of them. While the crowd was definitely excited to be there, Cisco may have played a part in inflating the numbers a bit...
Then again, the running to get into the keynote was truly mind-boggling. That's the first time I've seen that as well!

This really captures the highlights Sue. Moscone certainly was humming with non-stop activity, and I think I saw more than one DJ setup. Plus Cisco really wanted to make sure no one lost their way -- I don't think I've seen so many people hired to help with logistics questions.

The scene before Chambers' keynote was something, with professional drummers and dancers in the aisles and thumping loud music. The attendees running to get seats up front when the doors opened to the ballroom blew me away; I've never seen anything like that at a tech conference!

If you thought consumerization killed UC, think again: 70% of our 488 respondents have or plan to put systems in place. Of those, 34% will roll UC out to 76% or more of their user base. And there’s some good news for UCaaS providers.